


The Mask of Urbanity (The RED Spy)

by fire_is_my_happy_place



Series: The Undying [1]
Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Anal Sex, BDSM, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Oral Sex, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Torture, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-13
Updated: 2015-05-13
Packaged: 2018-03-12 06:06:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3346319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fire_is_my_happy_place/pseuds/fire_is_my_happy_place
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the RED Spy was traded to Miss Pauling for a crate of assault rifles by the Viet Minh, he did not expect to be whisked away to the US, nor to find a surprisingly kindred soul in the form of a hitman and convict from New Zealand. His seduction of the RED!Sniper, intended to simply offer him a form of release, became something more as he discovers that no man is ever an island, no matter how hard he tries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Better Run Through The Jungle

The Spy was recruited in 1954, after a brutal operation in the hilly jungles around Buôn Ma Thuột. His mission had been to assassinate a local Viet Minh leader after recruiting an acceptable substitute. Unfortunately for him, the substitute was seen in his company one too many times before the death of the local captain, which is how he found himself in a three-by-five foot bamboo cage, marinating in his own filth and trying to ignore several of what he suspected were serious infections.

Insisting on his innocence, he felt, was a bit much at this point. The substitute had died three days ago and, with characteristic Viet Minh utility, had been tied to one wall of the cage to glare blankly, accusingly at the Spy and liquefy in the heat.

The Spy crouched, shifting his weight from side-to-side and rotating his calves to try and prevent cramping from setting in. The ground beneath his feet was a stew of dead Viet Minh and the inevitable result of human digestive processes, the level of which had overflowed the bamboo bottom of the cage. The necessity of sleep had eventually caused him to end up sitting in it, sticking his once fine linen pants to him. His shirt, long since sliced to ribbons, was stiff with salt from his sweat, as were the parts of his pants which weren’t damp with rot and urine. His hair was stuck to him in a rank mat, stiffened by salt at the ends. And, to the amusement of his captors, he had a beard he could have used to smuggle.

He would gleefully have committed murder for a bath. Or a gallon of clean water. Or a hot meal. And he would have gleefully killed the entire camp to escape, down to the petite woman who cooked for a few of the soldiers.

The Spy reached sideways for the bars, stretching and slowly contracting the muscles in his torso and arms, feeling the muscles already starting to soften from disuse where they weren’t stiff with infection from bites and cuts exposed to the sodden mess underneath his feet.

He knew he was running a fever by how bright and strange the plants cut away from the edges of the cage were, and by the messy, watercolor streams made by turning his head. The maggots dribbling from the eyes of the substitute had already dribbled into the bottom of the cage. He could barely tear his eyes away from their sinuous wriggling and the damning stream of his consciousness that reminded him of rice and his last hot meal, a week before.

The black-sheathed toes in front of him took some time to notice, and even longer to follow up, dulled curiosity calling his eyes to the pantyhose, the lined, linen hem of the skirt, up past the swell of her hips and to the bright green eyes behind cat-eyed glasses. In a liquid spate of French, she told the Viet Minh behind her that in this condition, he was only worth a single crate of guns, and possibly not even that.

The officer behind her stretched lazily and told her that he’d survive, that he’d already survived interrogation repeatedly, and that they had no use for him.

She responded by telling him that a crate of guns was a better deal than a shallow grave in the jungle and much less trouble. She also pointed out that his men were under-provisioned and outgunned for their ongoing war with the French and Americans, and that the guns would make a difference for his men.

After a few more sallies, they agreed and she bought him for a crate of assault rifles and ammunition. When they opened the door of the cage, he crawled out and slowly levered himself up using the cage sides, to look down at the top of her head and the bun of black hair that had developed a fine nimbus in the heat and moisture. She looked him up and down, looking at the pattern of bruising and cuts on his ribcage, the unhealthy redness around those wounds, at the flushing of his unmarked skin and his tremors.

She turned to the captain and renegotiated for a few buckets of water, a pair of pants and sandals, and a bar of harsh soap. Handing him the soap, she picked up the buckets and jerked her head. Behind the largest hut, she put the buckets down and told him to wash, not drink. His pride got him through his hair, the water browning immediately. But when he tried to peel his pants off, they stuck to the cuts on his ass and he was too weak to yank them off. She sighed, and worked them down, tearing pus from the cuts and dizzying him until he had to cling to the hut walls. She scrubbed him, the pain from the soap waking him from his stupor.

He could hear her swearing, but he was too dizzied to care about modesty. When she’d scrubbed the worst of the mud from his legs, she poured the clean bucket over him and helped him turn around, shivering with fever and the mild coolness of the water, despite the heat. She had to pull the new pants on him, sagging on his once thin and now emaciated hips. Tying them off, she peeled his once fine socks and shoes off and shoved the rope sandals on his feet. He drew himself up momentarily, then shuffled forward beside her to the waiting jeep.

She started the jeep, taking off down the rutted trails at a speed that seemed precipitous to him. He wrapped his fingers around the seat and simply watched the jungle blur, wondering dully if she was French and his government gave a shit. He couldn’t imagine that he was important enough to spur a rescue mission, let alone one that involved trading a full crate of guns for him.

He passed out in the seat while she was still driving, slumping into the dashboard. If she hadn’t grabbed him by the wrist, he would have rolled sideways out of the jeep. She swore and wrestled him into the bench seat in the back of the jeep, then kept driving. 

**< <<<<< \- >>>>>>**

He awoke in a clean bed, light-headed but without the sick throb that had dominated his thoughts. The Spy realized, with a mildly euphoric surprise, that he was not in fact dead. Moving in bed, his muscles ached, but he could feel no cuts, no infection leaching into his bones. He sat up carefully and looked around. The room was small and Spartan, a single bed and nightstand the primary furniture, aside from a single chest of drawers. The nightstand held a pitcher of clean, cool water and a single cup. After a cursory sniff, he didn’t bother with the cup, taking the pitcher in both hands and chugging as much of it as his stomach could hold. He sat back, speculating on the design of bed and nightstand, both of which were entirely too undecorated for anything but a military base of some kind.

When the door opened, he heard the distinct click of a lock being disengaged, and knew himself to be a prisoner. The same, black-haired woman backed into the room, dragging a cart behind her. The cart contained several covered dishes and a copy of _Le Monde_ , and he tried to surreptitiously find the date. She relocked the door and pulled the cart up to the bed.

“Can you hold a spoon?” She sat down on the edge of the bed, near his feet.

The Spy lifted a hand, noticing the convulsive shivering had stopped. He felt weak, but essentially able to feed himself. He turned laboriously in bed and uncovered the tray to find a bowl of broth and a small pile of toast. Picking up the spoon, he flattened the paper, checking the date.

“I see you can. I suppose I should introduce myself. I am Miss Pauling. You are Henri. Eat, Henri.”

 _They know my name_ , he thought. _Interesting_. _They must be well-connected. I haven’t used my real name in years_. “Is there some reason,” he said, then swallowed, “that I cannot have something more substantial?”

“Nothing more than simple caution. Finish that, and if it holds, we’ll get you more.”

He looked down. The date of the newspaper told him he’d lost two weeks to unconsciousness and his stay with the Viet Minh. He wondered what drugs he’d been fed, what he’d said. A discrete stretch told him he’d healed considerably for a single week, and that a few weeks of solid food and exercise would put him back in fighting shape. The newspaper must have been old—retained to keep him off balance. A scan of the events on the front page told him the unofficial war in Vietnam was going poorly for the French.

“Where am I?”

Miss Pauling shifted on the bed, looking at the carpet with an expression of mild censure. Her answer, after a pause, was evasive. “Somewhere safe. Don’t worry about it.”

Henri concentrated on the soup, finishing it and the small pile of toast. Neither tasted drugged to him, not that all of the particularly useful drugs had a strong taste. When he finished, she drummed her fingers against her thigh.

“There is something,” she said, “that I will need to tell you before we get you more food.”

He tensed, waiting for her to start asking questions he could not answer.

“Your physician,” she said quietly, “is German.”

Henri hissed, kicking the tray aside, and stood on shaking knees. “Get out.”

She sighed. “Give him a chance.”

Henri, screaming invective, grabbed the bowl and threw it at her, splashing her with the residue. “I don’t know,” he bellowed, “what this place is, but I will be no part of it. If you send him in here, I will kill him.”

Miss Pauling stood, wiping at her blouse absently. “We know what you lost in the war. You will find that he lost more.”

Henri took a step toward her, eyes blazing with hate. “Get out!”

Miss Pauling looked at him. “There is something else you need to know.”

Henri took another step, grabbing the collar of her blouse. With a twisting movement, she broke the hold and punched him in the solar plexus. The air huffed out of his lungs and he fell over, onto the bed.

“You are not,” she panted, smoothing her hair with her hand, “a French citizen anymore.”

Henri froze, looking up at her through the tears caused by the abortive spasms of his diaphragm.

“You are not a citizen of any country, Henri. You are an employee of RED.”

With a pitying glance, she righted the cart and picked up the tray. “We will send him in to check on you and bring more food shortly. He will have a guard. Behave yourself.”

Miss Pauling pushed the cart out of the door and relocked it behind her.  Henri curled up on the bed, waiting for his lungs to fully re-inflate and planning her murder.

**< <<<<<< \- >>>>>>>**

The first person through the door was a huge man, who scanned the room before locking his eyes on Henri. He muttered in Russian over his shoulder, and approached Henri with his hands out. In heavily accented French, he told Henri he was there to ensure his safety and the safety of his doctor. Henri rolled off the bed, backing into the corner.

The man who came in next, locking the door, was older. Speckled with silver, his black hair stood in an unruly swirl around his head. Blue eyes looked sadly at Henri behind the small circles of his glasses. Long lines next to his mouth placed him somewhere north of 45, and his hunched shoulders did nothing to hide the width of his shoulders and small belly. A white coat over black slacks, a vest and a white button up shirt all hung loosely on his body, his cheekbones sharp and the hollows under his eyes purple with sleeplessness.

“I understand,” he said, haltingly, “vhy you do not vant me to treat you.”

Henri simply sneered at him, his lips curling back from his teeth and his fists clenched tight.

“I am not,” the man said, “going to hurt you.”

Henri spat on the floor beside his bare feet. “I have seen,” he growled, “what you people have done to my family, my friends. I have seen the bodies, have seen the experiments and the bodies of children piled high for burning, blistered with gas. I have seen the scarecrows of the camps, the women raped by your soldiers.” His fingers opened into claws. “I will not be killed for your experiments.”

The man closed his eyes briefly, the expression on his face full of a despair so acidic Henri briefly wondered why the man had not killed himself. The larger man, his escort, turned toward the man and said something softly in Russian before turning back to Henri.

“You do not know what you do. I forgive this time. I do not forget. Do not make him remember more than he does.” He took a breath. “You will come back and sit on bed like good boy, or I will hold you.”

Henri laughed, a high wild cackle. “Come try.”

The older man held out his hand. “Do not hurt him, Mischa.”

The large man growled. “Do not tell me what to do. I hurt him only as much as I have to, so that he will be good boy.” He walked slowly around the bed, crowding Henri in his corner.

“Why,” Henri asked. “Why would you be his friend? Your people fought his in the war.”

“He is good man. They torture him for not obeying. They kill his wife for hiding his children. They kill his children for not joining war.”

The large man loomed over him, easily snagging Henri’s wrists. “They send him to camp. He nearly die taking care of prisoners. And you torture him no more.”

Henri watched the German’s face go blank, a fine tremor in his hands. The large man dragged him toward the German, whose shoulders bowed further with the weight of his memories. When Henri had been firmly pressed to the bed, the large man reached out gently for the German’s hand, squeezing it, and said something in Russian.

With a shudder, the German looked up, his eyes utterly haunted in his pale face. Henri watched him gather professional composure slowly around himself like a familiar blanket. When the German touched his wrist to take his pulse, Henri could not prevent himself from shivering once. The German refused to look him in the eye, taking his pulse, laying a cold, clammy hand on his head, feeling his neck, and laying a stethoscope to Henri’s chest. The German stepped back.

“You are vell, considering your ordeal. If you can hold zhe broth, ve vill try solid food.” He put a hand on his chest. “I am zhe Medic. Zhis is zhe Heavy.”

Henri looked the large man up and down. “I’m sure he is. But don’t you have names.”

The Medic looked at him and shrugged. “Our names no longer matter. You are zhe Spy.”

“The Spy?” Henri laughed. “Why not, that’s as good a name as any. What is this place?”

“For zhat,” the Medic replied, “you must ask _Fräu_ Pauling. Zhe Heavy vill bring you more food soon.”

“Is this a prison?” Henri’s fingers snarled in the sheets.

“In zome ways,” the Medic replied. “But it iz a very nice one.”

**< <<<<< \- >>>>>>**

The Heavy came back in a half hour later with a pre-cut steak, several fried eggs, a small loaf of bread, butter and broccoli on the cart. A carafe of orange juice accompanied it. The smell alone was enough to make the Spy’s stomach complain loudly and at some length about its emptiness. Henri noticed that there were no sharp implements on the cart, and that even the cup was made of plastic.

As he started to eat, the Heavy sat on the edge of the bed, near the foot, and watched him. “Can see you are not happy. Want to give you chance to talk about it.”

Henri looked over, mouth full of steak, and swallowed heavily. “You pretend to be my friend while the woman threatens me. It would be efficient if I were stupid.”

The Heavy snorted. “Is not what you think. We are all trapped here.”

“Trapped by walls? By guards?”

The Heavy laced his fingers over a knee and leaned back, resting his lower back against the foot of the bed. “We are in US, not legal, and middle of nowhere. Is nowhere to go. Is nowhere to go back to. Our countries—,” he let go of his knee briefly to make a gesture across his throat, “we are gone. They do not want us.”

“And you have not tried to escape?”

The Heavy shrugged. “I go where? Where I go that they trust Russian speaker? How I get out of US? Where I find people that speak Russian? Why I not arrested as communist? Have seen American senator—McCarthy—on television. Would be arrested immediately when open mouth.” He spread his fingers across his belly. “No, here I make money. I eat well. No one arrests me. No camps. Work easy.”

“Where do you even spend the money?”

“Is towns some distance away. Small. People rough, mind own business. Bars serve us. Little stores. Is not so bad.” He sat up and pointed at the plate. “Eat vegetables.”

Henri picked his fork back up, surprised to find he had eaten the steak, the fried eggs, and most of the loaf of bread. He made a face, but ate the broccoli and then drank the entire pitcher of orange juice. He was attempting to eat the loaf of bread when his stomach gave a single heave.

“Is enough,” the Heavy said. “When you are ready, can bring more. Will not starve you here. Helped Doktor care for you. Were in bad shape.”

Henri ran his hand unconsciously down his much abused torso. “ _Oui_. Something went awry.”

The Heavy laughed. “Could see that much. Helped Doktor pin you down and take splinters out from under fingers and from back. Had to hold you down so Doktor could drain pus from sores.”

Henri’s stomach heaved again. The Heavy looked at him knowingly. “Is better now. No more jungle. No more bamboo.”

Henri burped, then looked at the Heavy. “Why was I unconscious for so long?”

The Heavy gave him a half-smile. “Some was transport. Some was very sick body and need for sleep. Some was need for quiet patient. You screamed in sleep and thrashed. Needed rest.”

Henri touched a hand to his wrists. If he’d been out for a week, he might be addicted to whatever they’d used. He wondered if he would have to suffer through the pain of withdrawal again and shivered once. The Heavy watched the shiver.

“Are not addicted. Doktor has access to many things and used them to get rid of drugs in you.” He reached out and patted the flinching Frenchman on the shoulder. “Get better. Will need your strength.”

“What do we do here?”

The Heavy stood slowly, face turned away from the Frenchman. “We kill,” he said simply, leaving and taking the cart with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: Chapter title drawn from Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Run Through the Jungle." Chapter titles will be drawn from songs about war.


	2. Le Déserteur

Days flew by. The Spy exercised in his room—jumping jacks, sit ups, stretching, working until he could no longer move and then sleeping—and ate ravenously. He explored the room and attached bathroom, finding the anonymous hotel toiletries he expected. The clothes in the drawers were uniformly scarlet, from briefs to ties, with the exception of an entire drawer of crisp, white Oxfords. He wondered if the color was, in its own way, a uniform of sorts, and if so what group might use the color that way. None of the groups he knew about wore unrelieved scarlet, a poor choice for espionage or any covert operations.

After a few weeks, he started to get better muscle definition and to feel capable of fighting someone, anyone to ease the tedium of his days. Sometimes his meals would be delivered while he napped, but never with anything sharper than a plastic fork.

By the third week, he was ready to climb the walls, but the ventilation shaft was too small.

By the fourth week, he was considering offering to blow the Heavy in order to be allowed to explore the base.

By the fifth week, he had. The massive man shied away from him with a look of mild horror and told him to wait.

Miss Pauling came into the room a few minutes later. “Feeling better?”

The Spy spun on his heel and gave her a lascivious grin. “ _Mademoiselle_ , I could infiltrate an enemy base, make love to the barracks, and leave with the codes to their bombs.”

She gave him a long, measuring look. “Then we should discuss the rules. If you attempt to leave the grounds without permission, we will come fetch you. We can find you anywhere, the specifics of which I will not trouble you with. You should take this opportunity to introduce yourself to your teammates before operations start. Many of your teammates are in similar predicaments.”

Miss Pauling’s eyes flicked down him. “Do try and be more charming.”

He held a hand to his chest with a wicked smile. “I’m devastated. I shall have to try my hardest to be attractive to my teammates.”

“Smarmy, Henri, is not attractive.”

“Tell that, my dear woman, to the many people I’ve bedded.”

She gave an irritable shrug and unlocked the door, leaving it open as she walked down the hall. He turned, looking down the hall, and decided to go the opposite direction. The doors he passed were marked with symbols—a winged foot, a fist, crosshairs, a bomb—when he finally found an unmarked door, he pushed through it. The room was full: a large couch, several overstuffed couches, a fireplace, an oddly thin television set, and a poker table and chairs. It was windowless. He found himself wondering if the entire base was mostly windowless and if so, why.

The Spy walked out of that room and went into the next unmarked door, finding a small and quite messy kitchen through a dining room. Leaving those alone, the next set of doors were to a small but well stocked surgery. The Medic looked up as the Spy walked in, the skin around his eyes tightening as he identified the Spy.

“ _Ja_? Vhat do you need?”

“Simply exploring.”

“Explore elsewhere.” The Medic looked down, pen scratching against a pile of papers on the desk. The Heavy walked out of a door in the back of the room on hearing noises, and stood behind the Medic, watching the Spy with a threatening expression.

“You two are lovers, _non_?” He had the satisfaction of seeing the Medic flinch and the Heavy curl his massive hands into fists. “I am not troubled, _mon frères_ , merely observing.”

The Heavy took a single step toward him, face ruddy with rage. “Get. Out.”

The Spy smiled smugly and backed out, putting his hands in his pockets. He could, at least, attest to the skill of the tailors who had made his suit. It fit as if bespoke, and contained a variety of cunningly hidden pockets, currently empty. Despite the tailoring of his suit, he felt naked, even exposed without his normal assortment of knives. Several of the pockets felt tailored to hold a variety of knives discretely, and he missed their comforting weight against his body. The fabric of the clothing they’d given him was opulent—impractically nice for an operating uniform, though he appreciated the kind of money that had been spent on them.

A few more steps took him to a heavy iron door, which he opened carefully. Outside the door stretched dun, sandy soil dotted with short, scrubby bushes and small clumps of yellowed grasses that rustled in the fitful breeze. The Spy stood, shocked, scanning the dilapidated buildings in the distance, graying under the sun, and the pitilessly blue sky, free of clouds. With a shudder of disgust, he realized that there was little in the way of cover anywhere near the base. The soil under his feet would leave tracks that even the least experienced tracker could follow, and the lack of clouds meant the place would get little, if any, rainfall.

It was, in short, the worst of all environments for hiding. Even the crevasses he could see were of dubious depth to hide him.

After a long moment, he started to scan to the sides. Walking the outside of the base, he noticed very few windows at all, far too small for even him to crawl into despite his thin frame. Behind the base, he noticed a beaten camper behind a few of the stubby trees. Curiosity led him to it cautiously, the small crunch of his footsteps loud in the silence. Before he quite reached the camper, a rusty voice called out quietly.

“Not another step.”

The Spy froze, scanning the ground around him, eventually locating a shape laying in the scrubby bushes next to the camper.

“Hello,” the Spy said. “I just got… recruited.”

“That’s nice,” the voice whispered. “Now bugger off.” The barrel glinted in the sun as the shape described a small circle.

“You hide well,” the Spy said. “How are you doing that in this landscape?”

There was a brief sigh. “I am hesitant to kill you, mate, because I don’t know this place. But I will kill you if you don’t bugger off.”

The Spy took a step back, eyes narrowing. “I will go,” he said, “but this is not over.”

“Probably not.”

When the Spy stepped back into the base, he bumped into a man wearing an overly large helmet. The man whirled on his heel and stood, staring suspiciously from the shadow under the helmet.

The Spy put out his hand. “Hello.”

A dangerous flush spread up the man’s cheeks. “Where are you from?”

The Spy put his hand down, curling his fingers at the man’s tone. “Where do you think I am from?”

The flush reached the man’s ears and he put his hand on the trench shovel hanging from a loop in his belt. Behind him, the Heavy popped his head out of the surgery and sighed.

“Is no fighting in base.”

The helmeted man ignored the Heavy. “I said where are you from.”

The Spy drew himself up, back rigid and shoulders high, and answered. “ _Je suis Alsatian, et vous êtes un imbécile_.” 

The Heavy came down the hall way at a lumbering run in time to pry the two men apart. “Do not care who started it. No fighting on base!”

The Medic joined him, pinning the swearing, gouging Spy to one wall while the Heavy did the same with the helmeted man. “I see,” the Medic panted, “that you have met zhe Soldier.”

“What,” the Spy spat, “is this about?”

The Medic sighed in his ear. “He does this with everyone. I do not think he has left zhe last war yet.”

Across from them in the hallway, the Heavy murmured in the Soldier’s ear, his bass rumble soothing and slow. The Spy could see the Soldier start to relax, the sharp shovel lowering as the Heavy talked.

“Are we all madmen here?” The Spy shrugged off the Medic’s hands. “Is this where they keep the madmen? I have been threatened by a man in the bushes, this fool attacked me, and we are in the middle of the desert. What kind of place is this?”

The Medic stepped back, hands relaxing to his sides. “It is a military base of sorts. And ve are soldiers.”

The Spy smoothed his hair and tugged at the jacket of his suit, trying in vain to pull the wrinkles out of the cloth. “There are,” he said astringently, “many wars in the world, only a few of which are being fought in deserts and none of which are being fought in the US. And so I repeat myself: what kind of place is this?”

The Soldier reholstered his trench shovel and pushed past the Heavy, stalking heavily toward the living room.

The Heavy sighed. “Am nursemaid again.”

The Medic turned to him, eyes softening. “Thank you, Mischa.”

The Heavy answered the Spy, after a short pause. “Is a private war. Not one countries care about. Contest between companies.”

“That woman mentioned that we were employees of RED?”

“Is company name, _Да_.”

“What does that mean? What is RED?”

The Medic sighed, pulling his glasses from his face and polishing them on his shirt. “It means that ve are parts of the company. Ve have no names but our function, und no vhere else to go. Red iz reliable excavation and demolition, not that ve are construction company.”

“What happens if we leave?”

The Medic and Heavy exchanged glances before the Medic answered. “Ve are allowed to go sometimes. But to stay gone? Zhat ve cannot do.”

The Spy tugged at his cuffs, a nervous habit he had never been able to break himself of. “Then what do we do?”

The Heavy’s eyebrows lowered. “Have answered this. We kill.”

“But who do we kill?”

“You vill see,” the Medic said. “I vould avoid zhe Soldier for a time.”

The Spy’s eyes narrowed. “What is wrong with that man?”

The Medic and Heavy exchanged a single, significant glance. “It is… complicated,” the Medic said. “Simply do not trouble him. Do not trouble anyone here. Be most careful vhen you enter a room, und do not explore others’ rooms. Zhey may take it poorly.” 

**< <<<<< \- >>>>>>**

The Spy wandered the halls, peeping through doors, until he found the armory. Sorting through the weapons, he settled on a balisong, a garrote, and a nicely engraved revolver with spare clip. He was pleased to confirm that, indeed, the pockets in the suit were tailored to hide the weapons and did so without any appreciable sign of their presence. He flexed his fingers, wondering if a convenient set of thin gloves could be found, and a mask or some other way to render his features anonymous. Most of his time in the field had been behind the scenes, and he was loathe to surrender anonymity.

The weight of the weapons gave him greater confidence, and his growing boredom led him into the living room after discovering a well-stocked gym. Sitting on the couch was a large, one-eyed black man, hair shaved to a short, curly bristle. His lap held a small box covered in tiny buttons, which he was using to make the television change channels. With a snort, the man turned the television off with the little box, and picked up a bottle next to him, swigging liberally.

The Spy circled the couch and plunked down on the other end, intending to introduce himself. Before he could speak, the figure turned.

“Yeh’ll be the new recruit, then. What shithole did they pull yeh out of?”

With a wince, the Spy responded. “A shithole, _oui_. A shithole in Vietnam.”

“Yeh’ll have been a spy, then?” The figure nudged the Spy’s arm with the bottle and the Spy took a cursory swig, then choked.

“ _Mon dieu_ , what is in this?” The Spy scrubbed his mouth with the heel of his hand, eyes prickling. “I have drank cane liquor with a serpent in it that was less... less….” He coughed explosively, wheezing.

The figure’s head tilted back and he laughed, the loud sound echoing against the bare walls. “Aye, meh scrumpy has a bit of a kick.”

“A bit of a kick? It kicks like a stallion being gelded.” The Spy shivered, despite the solid core of warmth in his stomach.

“So,” the man said. “A Spy?”

“That is,” the Spy said, “such a small term for such a complicated job.” He unbuttoned his suit coat and leaned back against the couch, hooking an ankle over his knee. “I would say that I merely found opportunities and exploited them, under the minimal direction of the French government. And you, you are Scottish?”

The man snorted. “How could yeh tell?”

The Spy rolled his eyes. “And what do you do here?”

“I blow things up. My… title is Demo.” He held out his hand, and the Spy shook it, marveling at the mass of calluses on his palm and his sanded fingertips. The Spy had run into a hand like that before, on someone who cracked safes for a living—the necessary sensitivity and lack of fingerprints required a good safecracker to sand the prints and first layer of skin from their fingers, an excruciating process.

“I see yeh’ve noticed meh hands.” The Demo rubbed his fingertips together gently. “I canna wire a good bomb without meh fingers being sensitive.”

The Spy gave him a mildly disbelieving glance. “And I suppose, if I were to ask, there might be no banks in your past that had come up rather shorter than they might have on their deposits.”

The Demo grinned broadly. “Lad, I have no idea what yeh mean. I’m a simple demolitions expert with a clean record.”

“In which countries?”

“The US canna pin anything on me.”

The Spy cocked his head, looking at the guileless expression on the Demo’s face, seeking deeper and finding a mildly predatory amusement. “I see. And why are you here?”

The Demo’s lips quirked, but he did not answer, merely took another swig from the bottle and offered it again to the Spy.  The Spy lifted his hands, turning it down.

“What is that thing in your lap?”

The Demo lifted the small box and tossed it at the Spy. “If yeh want anything specific about it, yeh’ll have to ask tha Engineer.”

The Spy turned it over in his hands, noting how tiny it seemed. It couldn’t have been more than a four inches long, and it was packed with tiny buttons. “What does it do?”

The Demo pointed at the suspiciously thin television set in front of him. “It turns that on. We don’t get much around here, but the Engineer is working on it. He has some sort of antenna thing he’s been rigging on the roof. We don’t get proper football, but he says he might be able to get something in the next week or so.”

“Where would I find him?”

The Demo pointed to his left. “End of the hall, down tha stairs, and don’t wear blue if yeh want to live.”

The Spy decided that he was among madmen, but at least a few of them were affable enough. Pushing himself off the couch, he took several steps to the door before turning back. “If a man were to be in need of a cigarette, where could he find one?”

The Demo rolled his head back to look at the Spy. “Fer that, you’ll have to wait until we go to town. Best ask tha Medic when that’ll happen. He’s our keeper when Miss Pauling isn’t about.”

“Where does she go?”

“Everywhere.” The Demo’s face grew serious. “Don’t think any less of her for being a lass. She’s as quick ta shoot as any of us. Yeh can also ask tha Engineer. He orders from the company fer us.”

The Spy looked at his face. “How long have you been here?”

The Demo lifted his head and didn’t answer. After a long, tense moment of staring at the back of the Demo’s head, the Spy pushed through the door in search of the Engineer.

Down several sets of stairs, he found a short hallway that led to an iron door. Stepping off the stairs, he heard a single beep. When he turned his head, he saw a gun sweeping the hallway on its own, topped by a red light. The Spy froze, taking a deep breath, as the gun panned side to side. After a few seconds, when it hadn’t opened fire, he took his first step. It beeped again, but did not shoot. The iron door opened, and a stocky, shave-headed man in goggles peeked out it.

“What now?”

“Hello,” the Spy called. “I am the Spy.”

The goggles looked him up and down. “Then I suppose you’ll be wanting your gadgets.”

“My what?”

The man in the goggles opened the door the rest of the way and pushed up his goggles. “Have they not briefed you yet?”

“Has who not briefed me?”

The Engineer sighed heavily. “I don’t know what in the hell people are thinking sometimes. Well, come on, then.” He waved a gloved hand, and the Spy walked forward cautiously to the beeps of the gun behind him.

When he walked into the lab, the first thing he noticed was the bigger, uglier brother of the little gun outside. The Spy was not sure what it fired, only that he did not wish to be in front of it when it did. It beeped, scanning the room over and over. The Spy shivered—to be constantly scanned by something that could kill you if it malfunctioned took a particular kind of mind. His estimate of the Engineer grew more frightening by the second. “Are those… missiles?”

“What, that? Heh-yeah, just little ones.” The Engineer strode over to one of the lab benches and returned with a cigarette case and a watch. “So these are going to be your disguises.”

The Spy looked at the perfectly ordinary silver cigarette case and the watch, then at the Engineer, who poked him with them. “Take them already, and open the cigarette case.”

The Spy took both objects gingerly, then opened the cigarette case to find nine silhouettes, with little buttons beneath them.

“Press any of them buttons and you’ll change the way you look. And you see that button on the side of the watch?”

The Spy turned the watch, finding the button.

“Well, the easiest way to do this is with a mirror. Hang on.” The Engineer dug around behind a stack of boxes and emerged with a two foot mirror, which he held in front of the Spy. “Okay, put that watch on and push the button.”

The Spy, in the grip of what his rational mind persisted in calling the shared delusions of these madmen, obediently strapped the watch on and pushed the button.

He disappeared. There was nothing in the mirror, nothing to see when he looked down, nothing there at all. He stumbled backward, sprawling and then crawling on the floor.

“I haven’t quite worked out the kinks yet,” the Engineer said. “Everyone I’ve had try it says that it’s impossible to walk, ‘cause you can’t tell where you are. Something about needing to see themselves to know where they are or some other bullshit like that. How you doing?”

The Spy fumbled for the button and pressed it repeatedly, flickering in and out of sight, before he could slow himself down. “What,” he said, voice shaking, “is this place?”

The Engineer shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. “It’s the company. It’s a company base. Far as what company, I’m sure they told you. RED, like your suit and my shirt, them guns and most of the walls.”

“No, but what is this place?” The Spy pulled himself up on the table behind him.

“Uh, I think you’d better talk to Miss Pauling. We’re getting out of my depth here, real fast.” The Engineer pushed his goggles down. “I know she was here today, but she’s probably gone again. She’s real busy right now.”

“Doing what?”

“Far as I know,” the Engineer said, stretching, “assembling the teams. We ain’t her only project.”


	3. With God on Our Side

The base speakers crackled twice before the voice came on, reminding the Spy of too many early morning wakeup calls during his training. The Spy jumped, looking around wildly to find the intercom speaker and locating it in a corner, above a cluttered work bench. The voice itself, once it finally came on, sounded like one of the innumerable women who seemed to pop up on barstools in every bar in the world, whiskey and cigarette-ruined voices calling for one more.

“Report to the briefing room at once.”

The Engineer swore and laid down the wrench he had just picked up, then turned to the Spy. “You’re gonna wanna practice with those things, but we don’t have time to do it now.” He sighed, and strode toward the door. The Spy followed, partially out of curiosity and partially because, as his rational mind kept insisting, the delusions of the mad are quite catching in the right circumstances.

Up the stairs, through the door, down the hall, around the corner, and into a room with a central, rectangular table, and a large, movie-style screen on one wall—they both sat on opposite sides of the table, away from each other. In the middle of the table sat what the Spy thought might be a telephone, but shaped like no telephone he’d ever seen. He watched the other men file into the room. The Demo merely plunked himself into the nearest seat to the door. The Soldier sat across from him, the skin around his eyes tight with suspicion and rage. The Heavy and Medic sat together, the Heavy between the Medic and the other team members. A solitary figure in a full, plastic suit came in behind them and sat across the table from them, still in a respirator and anonymous for it. The last man in was a tall, thin man cradling a rifle as another man might cradle a lover. Instead of sitting, he put his back in a corner of the room and slouched against the wall. The Spy recognized the gun barrel, and realized this was the man in the bush, this lanky, slouching figure under a shapeless brown hat.

He eyed him openly, looking for and finding the edge of tattoos on his upper arms, peeping out from under the edges of his rolled sleeves. The man shifted, and the Spy followed the sleeve up past the crosshairs insignia on his upper arm to the eyes behind yellow lenses. The eyes were feral, with the beginning of a fine, defensive rage. The Spy looked away, suddenly and mysteriously embarrassed, and smoothed his hair, willing away the faint traces of flush that had tinted his cheeks.

After a tense moment, a whir in the ceiling announced that a projector had kicked on, and the voice sounded from the phone in the middle of the table. “Good morning, gentlemen. We are missing one member, but he is in transit right now. Welcome to RED. The screen showed a faint insignia, and with a casual swipe, the Demo turned off the lights, bringing the insignia into sharper focus: a bomb, with the word RED written on it.

“Your lives before the company have disappeared. You are no longer the citizens of any country, and as such your passports, identification and birth certificates have been revoked. Many of you have no ties, but for those of you that do, you will be permitted to send some of your salary home. You may not leave the base without permission until such time as the company no longer needs your services. You belong to RED.” The voice paused, and the Spy wondered if anyone else felt the creeping sense of horror that announcement still gave him. To be without a home, to be parted from the mountainous towns of his home, the orchards and rivers—to never again walk the streets of the town he was born in, never again visit the field in which he took his first kiss, and never to eat the pastries his mother had made. He shivered.

“Your duties are simple. You have been retained to compete, in a variety of different objectives, with another team, code name BLU. During the course of the competition, you are authorized to use any means necessary to complete your objectives. You have been retained for your respective specialties, and will be expected to employ those specialties in the service of your mission goals. Each of you has been given specific equipment, which you will be expected to master and to care for.”

The voice paused for a racking, chesty cough. “You will also be exposed to technology the likes of which is not anywhere else in the world, and are bound on pain of death not to discuss this technology with any person not on this base. For more specific information on the medical technology, I turn this meeting over to the Medic and Engineer.”

The Medic looked over at the Engineer and shrugged, then stood. “Hello,” he said, nervously. “I am zhe Medic. I have met most of you.” He gave a small, formal bow before continuing. “Zhis base is equipped with certain technologies that vill allow you to be healed much faster than normal.” He reached under the table, pulling up a heavy, black pack that he strapped on his back and picking up a hose and nozzle that dangled from it.

“Zhe easiest way to demonstrate zhis is practical. Mischa, if you vill?”

The Heavy sighed, and pulling a pocket knife out, sliced his forearm heavily, blood immediately pooling on the table under his arm. The Medic flicked a switch on the side of the nozzle and a beam of red light slid out of it. The Spy watched in incredulous amazement as the cut slowly closed. The Heavy gave a sigh that was just on the decent side of a moan, and flexed his now-whole arm. The Medic flicked off the beam.

“With zhis, I can heal almost any wound you may sustain in zhe course of battle. Zhere is another technology, but I vill not trouble Mischa to demonstrate it. For zhat, I turn zhe meeting to zhe Engineer.”

The Medic pulled his arms from the straps and gently set the pack down, then sat. The Engineer stood, hands clasped in front of him.

“I ain’t gonna bother you gentlemen with the specifics, but I am going to need to borrow you one by one to get you in the system. Once in the system, you won’t die. Well, not permanently.”

The room was utterly silent. The first person to make a sound was the Soldier, whose bitter laugh broke the silence like a rock through a window. He laughed so hard he had to put his head down on his arms, where the laughter sounded suspiciously like sobs.

The Demo spoke. “Yeh’ll pardon meh for saying I don’t believe yeh.”

The Engineer sighed. “Administrator, would you mind playing that clip?”

With a ratcheting whir, the projector started again. On the screen, the Engineer led a goat on a lead to a platform. Once the goat was on the platform, the Engineer tied the lead off and walked to a set of levers on a stand. He threw a lever, and the screen grew intolerably bright. Once the brightness faded, the Engineer led the goat off the platform, drew a sidearm, and shot it in the head. The goat fell, silently, with the boneless slump that only the dead have. After a few seconds, a glow surrounded its body, and it reappeared on the platform. It froze there for a moment, then started to kick wildly. The Engineer let it work itself out before the tape cut off.

“Turn the lights back on, would you, Demo?”

When the lights were back on, the Engineer was rolling his hard hat between his hands. “I know this is hard to accept, fellas, but it works. It ain’t pleasant, but it works.”

“How,” the Spy said when he finally found his tongue, “do we know that was the same goat.”

The Engineer leaned forward and turned his head, pointing to a neat, circular entry wound on his temple.

“I ran the first human trials on myself. It don’t scar any more, but that is a .22 bullet—killed me very dead. We have film of that, if you’d like to see it.”

The Spy’s hair stood up all over his body, and he realized his mouth was hanging open. He closed it with a click and sat back, eyeing the Engineer. In the silence, the Soldier finally stopped sobbing and simply sat there, his head pillowed on his forearm.

“We ran the second trial on the Soldier. You’ll have to ask him what that was like.”

Even at this distance, the Spy could see the Soldier shaking.

The Announcer’s voice crackled to life again. “Operations will start in two days. You have the next two days to practice with your equipment and start to work as a team. Your final team member should be at the gate shortly. I suggest you make good use of the next two days.”

With that, the meeting was over. The Spy waited for everyone else to leave the room before getting up. He knew he had to escape, but he wasn’t sure how.

**< <<<<< \- >>>>>>**

The gadgets he’d gotten from the Engineer were going to be his salvation, if he could figure out how to use them. The Spy spent several hours in his room, simply trying to get used to not being able to see himself, then took his exploration outside, trying to negotiate the sand and scrub while invisible. The battery wore down after a short time, but it recharged quickly, giving him the ability to crouch behind a bush or rock for a few seconds and emerge, invisible again. His progress across the areas around the base was halting—hit and miss, stop and go. He scouted while he practiced, looking for places to hide, ways to sneak out parallel to the gate and find a way through it. Eventually, his circuit of the base and the fence brought him back to the camper parked in the scrub trees.

Curiosity got the better of him, and he flickered out of sight, creeping slowly toward the camper walls. The Spy managed to reach the camper without being shot, and paused against its side, waiting for the device to recharge. The door on the other side of the camper creaked open, and he froze against the camper, staring at the dial and listening to the faint crunch of footsteps.

“All right,” the voice said. “I heard you approach. You might as well come out.”

The Spy distinctly heard the snicking click of a bolt easing back and stabbed the button on his cloak, flickering out of sight. Ducking, he slid under the edge of the truck and watched the boots, softened by wear and the sand, ease around the edge of the truck.

He slid forward carefully in the sand, sharp spines of some local weed jabbing him in the stomach, and peeked up the long legs. The Sniper did, indeed, carry a bolt action rifle, and scanned the area near the truck. With a quick, fluid movement, he peered under the truck, face inches from the Spy. The Spy saw the fan of crow’s feet next to the Sniper’s eyes, the flat suspicion in them, and a fan of brown hair descending down the vee of the Sniper’s shirt. The Sniper stood after a second, clearly still sure someone was there, but unable to find anyone to shoot. The Spy’s cloak flickered off, and he stopped breathing, waiting for the Sniper to stoop again, to point the clearly well used rifle at him. The smell of the Sniper’s sweat, a musky, woody, rank smell, drifted away from him on the faint breeze. The Spy could hear the Sniper sniff, and realized that his customary spritz of cologne—they had, worryingly enough, supplied him with it—made him as obvious as the Sniper’s own smell made him to the Spy. The Sniper took another sniff and sighed, stooping again and putting the rifle barrel under the truck before his face.

The gun barrel, much polished and with a heavy nick in the outside edge, rested three inches from the Spy’s nose.

“Why don’t you come out, then, wanker?”

The Spy wriggled out from under the truck, expecting to die. The Sniper looked him up and down with an oddly blank expression that the Spy realized was his version of surprise.

“What the blue bloody blazes were you doing under my truck?” He pulled the rifle’s barrel up to cover the Spy out of habit.

The Spy cleared his throat and attempted to brush his suit jacket free of burrs and sand. “Practicing,” he said with as much dignity as he could muster. “I was practicing.”

The Sniper nudged him with the gun barrel. “Practicing to do what?”

“Practicing with my devices.” The Spy reached for the watch slowly, watching the Sniper’s finger on the trigger.

The Sniper’s lip lifted in a sneer, confused and contemptuous. “Oh yeah, what’d they give you?”

The Spy pushed the button on the watch and dived sideways, narrowly missing being cut in half by the rifle, fired by a startled Sniper.

“Holy dooley!”

The Spy whispered, “If you could keep your finger off the trigger for a moment….”

The Sniper swiveled, putting his back to the camper and raised the rifle, tracking from side to side.

“I’m not trying to kill you,” whispered the Spy. “I’m just trying to get used to these things.”

After a tense moment, the Sniper lowered the rifle a few inches. “Say I believe you,” he said. “That’s creepy.”

The Spy laughed, the sound hissing in the air. “I have been trying to deal with this all morning. It is more than creepy.”

At the sound of his voice, the rifle snapped back up, tracking and finding the source. “Turn that little thing off. I won’t shoot ya, but I won’t be talked to from nowhere.”

The Spy sighed, and pushed the button with his finger, flickering into sight. The Sniper looked down the barrel at him, motionless, then lowered it.

“I suppose we’re teammates,” the Sniper said.

“ _Oui_ ,” said the Spy.

They stared at each other. The Spy finally broke the silence. “I am,” he announced, “the Spy. And you are the Sniper.” The rifle and the way he hide made it clear that he had been employed to kill at a distance, and that he had considerable practice at it.

The Sniper shrugged. “Why not? It’s shorter than hired gunman or assassin.”

The Spy smiled for a second. “Spy is shorter than the person who facilitates certain opportunities on behalf of his government.”

“Leave it to the French to complicate a perfectly simple job description.” The Sniper’s faint smile took the sting from the statement.

“It was,” the Spy said wryly, “a complicated job.”

The Sniper gestured at him with the rifle barrel. “Ever kill a man for it?”

The Spy watched those fingers again, watched them held close but not quite touching the trigger, constantly ready to aim and fire. “ _Oui_ , a few.”

“What’s your count?”

After a long pause, the Spy responded. “Nine.”

The Sniper nodded, lips tilting up. “Twenty-one.”

“I suppose,” the Spy said, feeling oddly competitive and defeated by the differences in their kill counts, “that we are all men of fortune.”

The Sniper’s eyes grew wary again, the crow’s feet digging into the skin next to his eyes. “Yeah.”

“If I may be so bold,” the Spy said, gesturing carefully at the Sniper’s forearms. “You have marks?”

The Sniper hunched forward, shirt tenting over his chest as he tried to hide himself. “Don’t you worry about those.”

“I have always liked them.” The Spy found himself watching the strength in those wiry arms, following them up again and again to be stopped by the roll of the Sniper’s sleeves. Was that a curve, that lowest line, or did it end there?

The Sniper glared at him, the gun barrel swinging back up. “Never you mind those. Go on now.”

The Spy sighed. “Very well, Sniper.” He looked around. “The privacy must be quite nice.”

“It was.”

The Spy could see him disappearing under the hat, hunching over the rifle and becoming feral again. “I will go, then,” he said. “But I am not your enemy.”

The Sniper merely watched him, eyes catching the light as he turned to track the Spy, who rounded the edge of the camper and headed back toward the base.

Opening the base door, he caught the back of a lanky young man, talking to the Engineer. Looking the boy up and down, the Spy guessed that he couldn’t be older than twenty-two. His skin still had the creamy, unmarked look of youth, and while the boy was practically all leg and sinewy length, he still walked with the half-cock sure, half-tentative posture of someone fresh from high school. The Spy sniffed. Surely they were not now employing children in the service of war.

The boy’s accent reached his ears—the hard, flat vowels of some US city in the Eastern seaboard—as he bragged about himself. “I’m a pretty big deal. Best runner in the state competition.” The boy reached for his chest, jingling a set of tags that could not be his own. “I guess I’m here to run circles around everyone.”

The Engineer stared at the boy, letting him run down before speaking. “In a manner of speaking, son. You’re here to scout. In fact, that’s your name now. Scout.”

The boy blinked. “No, it ain’t. My name is Scott.”

“Not since you signed the paperwork it ain’t.” The Engineer shifted, rocking back on his heels slightly. “Now, you’re just Scout, Scout. If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you your bunk.”

“What about that guy?” The Scout jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the watching Spy.

“That guy is the Spy. I’m the Engineer. Come on, kid, I only have a few days to finish a few things. The shooting range is about a half-mile that way. The armory is down the hall on the left. You’re going to want to pick a gun and get some practice.”

The Scout swallowed heavily. “Anything else, Pops?”

“Yeah,” said the Engineer. “You missed the main meeting, but after the Medic scans you, you can’t die.”

The kid looked the Engineer up and down. “You hit your head or something?”

The Engineer threw his hands up and started walking toward his workshop. “You’ll see. Your room has a winged foot on it. Find it yourself.”

The Scout turned to the Spy. “They crazy around here?”

“ _Oui_ ,” said the Spy. “But he is telling the truth. We have only this day and the next, so if you have never fired a gun, you will want to practice a great deal over the next few days.”

“No, I mean about the dying.” The Scout’s feet moved restlessly, his fingers rhythmically squeezing his forearms through the leather of his jacket.

“ _Oui_ , that, too. Though the film of the trials is scare believable.” The Spy ran his fingers through his hair, tousling it, then smoothing it down over and over as he thought about the neat star on the Engineer’s temple and the kind of man who would shoot himself in the head to test technology that one would credit to a pulp novel and a fantastically drunk author.

The kid shivered. “This place gives me the creeps.”

The Spy agreed silently, then walked back to the armory to grab more ammunition.


	4. The Yard Went on Forever

The shooting range was located a half mile or so from base and toward a complex of buildings in the distance the Spy thought could have been the other team’s base. The Spy looked at the painted lanes and the targets with mild annoyance. The back of the range had a fence with cans and bottles, already set up, and there were also a few paper targets tacked onto hay bales, with the desert stretching long and empty behind it. No mechanism for fetching the targets—he’d have to shoot and fetch his own targets, tracking yet more sand into his shoes and making him spend more time under the merciless eye of the desert sun. The lanes had no roof, and lay open to the elements entirely. While the paint was fresh, he had no doubt that it would weather off quickly under the heat and radiation. He realized that, if he were going to spend much time out here, a hat would be very helpful, and wondered if he could get the company to supply him one.

 _It is_ , he thought, _interesting that the lanes were painted with both team’s colors_. Perhaps he’d meet his opponents here at some point. He wondered who they were, if they’d been recruited as he had, kidnapped from whatever lives they’d had and brought here unconscious.

Pulling the revolver out of its inner pocket, he double-checked the chamber out of habit and cocked it, pointing at the cans. When he squeezed the trigger, the revolver roared, bullet just missing the can he’d aimed for and knocking a spray of sand from the empty space behind the fence. He sighed. The damn thing needed to be sighted slightly to the left to hit, telling him the rifling in the barrel might be worn on one side, or possibly that the sights were mildly off. He pulled the hammer back and aimed, again.

There was a quiet noise behind him, and he whirled around, revolver still up. Behind him was a man in a blue, pin-striped suit, similar in build to himself and bearing a more modern pistol. The man was a dark brunette with the beginnings of gray, and his eyes were a brown so dark it appeared black until he tilted his head and the sun caught the iris. The wind caught and tousled his hair, picking waves from its thick mass, shaved nearly to the scalp on the sides and long on top. The RED Spy could see faint lines at the corners of his eyes, and a few dark spots high on one cheekbone. He had a characteristically Gallic nose, long and straight, and high, sharp cheekbones. His lips were a touch thin, but his mouth was wide and mobile. His body was built along sleek lines, and he was clearly athletic.

 _On the whole_ , the RED Spy thought, _a handsome man of middle age_.

“That’s an interesting affectation,” the man said, glancing briefly at the revolver. “Do you prefer everything to be an antique, or just your equipment?”

The RED Spy’s eyes narrowed. “Let me guess. The BLU Spy.”

The man gave a mocking little bow without taking his eyes off the RED Spy. “Indeed. It’s Spy versus Spy, or it will be. What aging government agency did they borrow you from?”

The RED Spy shrugged without lowering the revolver. “Does it matter, now that we’re company property?”

“How philosophical.” The BLU Spy looked at the tip of the revolver. “Really, if I’d wanted to kill you, I didn’t have to make any noise on the approach. I assume you’re as well-armed as I am.”

The RED Spy sighed and lowered the tip of the revolver. “I suppose,” he said, “that since hostilities have not started, there is no need to treat this as if it is a … professional encounter.”

The BLU Spy smiled and walked around him, taking a lane separated from his by one and laying several clips on the shelf in front of him. Pulling a cigarette from a case that was the mirror of the RED Spy’s disguise case, he lit it with a graceful flick. Looking over at the RED Spy out of the corner of his eye, he smiled and proffered the case. The RED Spy took a cigarette with a small but visible look of relief, and both spies turned to the targets with a cigarette clasped in their teeth, squinting through the smoke.

The RED Spy, having found how to aim with the revolver, was the first to hit the target. The space between the two men grew tense as they silently started competing to hit the most targets, to hit the most accurately. By the time both men had exhausted their loaded clips, no clear winner could be decided. The RED Spy privately decided to ambush his counterpart as much as possible because of the degree to which, when the man hit the target, the hole was dead on kill zones. The BLU Spy privately decided to ambush his counterpart as much as possible due to the degree to which the man was able to hit even when it seemed as if he were not aiming as accurately as he might. Even winging a man during combat would slow him enough to finish the job. No one moved the same after being shot.

The RED Spy turned toward his counterpart. “Thank you for the cigarette.”

“You’re welcome.” The BLU Spy looked him up and down. “You never did tell me what organization they borrowed you from.”

“Perhaps if you told me yours, I might tell you mine.”

The BLU Spy smiled briefly. “ _Le SDECE. Et toi_?”

“ _Moi aussi_.”

The BLU Spy’s eyebrows shot up. “ _Alsatian_?”

“ _Oui. Normandie?_ ”

The BLU Spy looked at the RED Spy, eyes narrowing. “Good ear. I worked quite hard to train away the accent.”

“If I were not a native speaker and familiar with it, I would not have heard it.” The RED Spy tucked the now-empty clips into his pockets.

“ _Ce était votre spécialité?_ ” 

The RED Spy smiled. “ _Action Militaire_ , _recrutement_ .” 

The BLU Spy looked at him. " _Contre-espionnage, interrogation_.”

They eyed each other, silence stretching on long. The RED Spy made a note to carry the Spy’s friend with him in the form of a fast-acting poison. If the technology worked as promised, it would be a quick route to escaping the circumstance, and there were fast-acting poisons that were not too painful. Certainly less painful than interrogation. The BLU Spy made a note to be quite careful what he said around his counterpart, who was no doubt excellent at finding blackmail material in even the most innocuous of exchanges.

“Well,” the BLU Spy said finally, “they sent you in to find traitors and me in to break them.”

“I prefer,” the RED Spy said, with a dry little smile, “to think of my specialty as seduction. There are many types, after all.”

The BLU Spy shrugged. “Better you than me. I’ve never cared for seducing them.”

“Just breaking them.”

The BLU Spy smiled, a vulpine pleasure lighting his face. “It has its own attractions.”

“Where were you when they picked you up?”

The BLU Spy smiled again, mockingly. “Here and there. And you?”

“Vietnam.” The RED Spy shivered with the memory of the cage.

The BLU Spy made a disgusted face. “That will be a boil on the ass of France if they are not able to crush the rebellion soon.”

“It already is a boil on the ass of France,” the RED Spy said. “And we’re losing it, though we cannot afford to.”

They looked at each other for a moment, taking each other’s measure. The BLU Spy noticed the casual tension in his counter-part’s body, the suggestion of caged violence that experience had made an easy alternative. The RED Spy noticed the fluid movements of the BLU Spy, which signaled fastidious practice at sparring, and the intensity with which he was being studied.

The BLU Spy wondered if the RED Spy had an active hand in the narcotics trade which funded many of the SDECE initiatives, and whether he had ever been an addict. The RED Spy found himself quite grateful of the efficacy of the Medic’s flush of his body, and the steadiness of his hands.

“Well,” said the BLU Spy, “I shall see you in a few days on the field.”

The RED Spy nodded his head in agreement, the space between them again becoming tense. The BLU Spy turned and walked toward the distant buildings. The RED Spy watched him go, watching the breeze catch and ripple his suit as he walked.

To himself, he muttered. “This would be interesting, if I were staying. _Le Contre-espionnage_ has an interesting reputation, and interrogators are often a strange and clever group.”

He turned back toward the RED base, again marking the gate as he passed it, seeing neither cameras nor guards. This did not, as he well knew, mean that there was not some fantastic device somewhere near the gate, nor did there appear to be mines, but if it was as it appeared to be, he could be out of the base that night.

He could not wait.

**< <<<<< \- >>>>>>**

Dinner found each man picking through the supplies and serving himself. The RED Spy made himself a quick sandwich, and took another back to his room, wrapped in wax paper. He had no idea how long the road had been coming in. If he were to have to walk it, not that he intended to, he’d need some sort of supplies. The mercenaries did not talk, each withdrawing into himself and preparing for the upcoming violence. The strange, suited figure did not remove its mask, instead grabbing a wedge of cheese and a loaf of bread, and retiring. The Scout looked as if he wanted to talk, but the forbidding faces of the men around him kept him quiet. The Spy decided to return for water, on his way to the garage and preferably a ride across the desert.

Several hours after midnight, the Spy left his room with several fresh clips of ammunition, and carefully entered the kitchen. The Sniper had his back to the Spy, and was chugging a half-gallon of milk as if putting out a fire in his chest. The Spy took a breath and the man wheeled around, huge knife in one hand, and pulled the milk jug from his mouth.

“It’s you again,” he said.

“ _Oui_. I was hungry.” The Spy smoothed his palms against his slacks, watching the huge knife. “We must stop meeting like this.”

The Sniper looked at him with a mild sneer. “Stop sneaking up on me, Sneak, and I will.”

“I was not sneaking. I was hungry. Should I wear bells so that I do not alarm you?”

An expression crossed the Sniper’s face so quickly that the Spy could not interpret it. The Sniper cleared his throat. “We bell goats sometimes. Keeps them out of trouble.”

The Spy looked at him incredulously. “Did you just compare me to a goat?”

“Why not? You’re always somewhere you shouldn’t be, and you don’t have enough sense not to stay out of trouble. Maybe someone should bell you, just so I don’t kill you.” The Sniper put the half-gallon on the counter next to him and capped it one-handed, watching the Spy sputter.

After a short pause, the Spy drew himself up and responded in a torrent of French invective, finally terminating in an invitation for the Sniper to go fuck himself and the goats.

The Sniper’s lips curled up in a half-smile. “Never liked the outback tradition.”

The Spy’s mouth fell open. “Bête!”

With a satisfied smile, the Sniper put the milk back, giving his back to the Spy, who thought briefly and seriously about stabbing him. When the Sniper turned back around, he saw the remnants of it on the Spy’s face and waggled the tip of the knife at him. “Ah-ah, Sneak. You’ll have to actually manage to sneak up on me first.”

The faint light coming from the hallway suddenly reminded the Spy of their isolation—the rest of the base asleep, or something like it, in those hours of the night which wring whispers from the wakeful. The Sniper stared at him as if waiting for something, his long legs shifting once with a faint burr from the denim.

After a moment, the Sniper said softly, “You’re not good at this, are you?”

The Spy flushed angrily, then pushed past him. When their shoulders met, briefly, his skin prickled. The Sniper did not move, letting the Spy try to reach around him, that same, faintly amused look on his face as the Spy finally noticed and filled a bottle. He let the Spy leave, watching him move with a tense patience that reminded the Spy of nothing so much as a stalking cat. 

**< <<<<<< \- >>>>>>>**

The garage had several smaller vehicles in it, including an old but quite serviceable motorcycle that the Spy very carefully rolled, without starting, to the gate. Surveying the ground, he saw none of the characteristic dips and bumps of mines. The gate itself, which he poked with a convenient stick, did not arc or shock him. With a single, easy push, it swung open. The RED Spy did not let himself start the motorcycle until he estimated himself to be a hundred meters from the gate, and then, with a sigh of relief, he started the engine.

Some distance down the road, what he estimated to be about ten miles, the faint lights of a town appeared. By the size, he could tell it was a town, several thousand souls. The buildings he passed were primarily crude, suggesting that the town was newish. Several large industrial buildings suggested that the town was primarily for mining or manufacturing, and he didn’t see a single police vehicle on his way through. He was not surprised to find it had open bars, and parked the bike in front of a rough-looking place. Mussing his hair, he made sure his knife was easily reachable and walked in.

The occupants of the bar, for the most part, were poorer, and after a brief look, went back to their drinks. The RED Spy looked around the room, seeking and finding a woman drinking on her own. He waited to absorb a bit more of the accent before sitting next to her and striking up a conversation.

She looked him up and down, eyeing his suit and returning to take in the pleasant smile on his face. “You’re a pretty boy, ain’t you?”

She tapped a cigarette against the table in front of her to pack the tobacco and brought it to her mouth, lighting it absently. He could see her pricing his suit and deciding that he was wealthy—her entire body was friendlier at the conclusion of it.

“Hardly a boy,” he said, “though you appear to be a lovely girl. I am a man in need of directions, and you appear to be a girl who might like some company.”

She knocked the ash off her cigarette. “Mister, you gotta be pretty lost to end up here.”

“Indeed I am,” he said. “Quite lost.”

“Mister, this is Teutfort, New Mexico. If the companies didn’t put so many things out here, none of us would be here. There ain’t nothing for miles but scrub, and you’d have to drive north for hours to find cities.”

He smiled wickedly at her. “And what do you do here, lovely?”

A faint blush stained her cheeks, and he suppressed his surge of satisfaction. It was good to know he was still a capable seducer, and that he’d guessed correctly about her proclivities—the handkerchief code was not hard and fast, but more and more places it was used as a quick introduction. The position and color of the bandana in her back pocket told him she was submissive and that she liked to be tied up, both of which were an easy enough fit for his skills.

“I’m nobody important,” she said, staring at the knowledgeable and filthy expression on his face. “I work at one of the plants, that’s all.”

“Ah, but you must be important,” he said. “No one who looks as you do could be anything less than important.”

“Now you’re just flattering me.” She laid a hand flat on the table between them, and the Spy reached out to caress it gently with one of his hands, pinning it to the table and feeling the shudder telegraphed through it.

“I assure you, I am not. You are a lovely woman.”

She turned her hand up underneath his, exposing the tender skin of her wrist, which he stroked as he reached forward, pulling her hand into his.

“I am a lucky man tonight,” he said, “to have been allowed such company.”

The woman’s pupils dilated and he watched her focus on his mouth, on the wicked smile that he poured years of experience seducing into. When she bit her lip, he raised her hand to his mouth and kissed the center of her palm.

“I thank you,” he said, lowering his voice slightly so that she had to lean forward to hear it, “for your kind help.”

The RED Spy gently lowered her hand to the table, letting his fingers linger before standing up. Before he had time to turn, she called him back. “Do you have anywhere to stay tonight?”

“Why no,” he said. “I had planned to drive all night, but I am quite tired.”

She pulled a twenty dollar bill from her purse and tucked it under the glass. “I live really close,” she breathed.

“I would hate to be a bother,” he said, a faint smile playing across his lips.

“You won’t be,” she said, and wound her fingers through his. 

**< <<<<<< \- >>>>>>>**

The woman had been asleep for hours. The Spy had missed this—the ability to make a woman shudder and cry, the ability to make her beg for more, mussing her hair into knots beneath her tossing head. He’d missed the feel of a body next to his, the feel of fitting himself into someone’s body as well as their mind and making them want him. If he’d done less than he craved, he had certainly impressed her, fucking her across the bed and through the room, against walls and the edge of the counters in her small kitchen with the energy he’d had to contain through his weeks convalescing.

She stirred in her sleep, whimpering and then cuddling into him. He looked down at the top of her head, then carefully combed her hair to one side to get it out of his nose. The RED Spy drifted on the edges of sleep, sated enough to let himself drift. Right before he dropped off, he heard a noise at the edge of hearing, a muffled footstep and the sound of cloth whispering against itself. His eyes snapped open, and he very slowly worked himself away from her, moving inches at a time and pausing. From memory, he felt across the floor of her bedroom with his bare feet, finding his suit coat without finding his knife or his gun.

A figure appeared to his left and he jumped backwards, but the woman did not wake. The figure cleared its throat.

“You do know that you really can’t escape, don’t you?”

The RED Spy recognized the faint accent of his BLU counterpart with a surge of alarm.

“If any of us leave the bases without permission, it triggers an alarm. If one of my teammates had left, they would have woken you. Instead, they woke me.”

The RED Spy froze, naked, as the BLU Spy turned the light on, then straightened to look at his opponent.

“She won’t wake. I gave her a little sedative. She’ll have a hell of a headache tomorrow, and she may not remember you were here at all.”

The RED Spy reached down for his pants with a sigh.

The BLU Spy stepped on them. “Don’t bother. It’s a nice look for you.”

The RED Spy looked up at him with a nasty expression on his face. “Do you like what you saw? I thought you did not like seduction.”

“What makes you think this is a seduction? I may just be testing to see whether you’re embarrassed by nudity.”

The RED Spy stood, hands on hips. “Did you miss the show?”

“No,” the BLU Spy said with a faint chuckle, stepping back. “I caught the last act. You’re energetic.”

The RED Spy shrugged. “I needed an outlet.”

The BLU Spy looked at him, head cocking. “And yet, you didn’t seem quite relaxed.”

“She tired too quickly.”

The BLU Spy smirked at him, putting his hands out and together, as if tied. “Or it wasn’t quite right.”

The RED Spy looked at him, smoothing his hair back. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“Some of the holds you put her in—did you think you invented them?”

“ _Non_. They were merely convenient for the position.”

“And the things you said.” The BLU Spy looked at the limp body of the woman on the bed. “You’re lucky she doesn’t speak French.” He looked the RED Spy up and down. “I would have gotten up and punched you.”

“And I repeat myself,” said the RED Spy, letting his hands frame his cock with a defiantly nasty expression on his face, “did you like what you saw? It’s right here.”

The BLU Spy stood, frozen, for a moment. The RED Spy walked forward slowly, closing the space between them. “She is out, you said, for the night?”

The BLU Spy closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “I am to administer a little reminder that you cannot escape.”

“Tell me something,” the RED Spy said, his face inches from his counterpart. “Top or bottom?”

The BLU Spy’s eyes grew glacial. “You’ll never know.” He planted his hand in the RED Spy’s chest and shoved him back a few steps. “Put your fucking clothes on.”

The RED Spy dressed, smirking, without giving his back to the BLU Spy, who was now visibly angry.

“And what,” the RED Spy said, straightening his cuffs, “is my punishment?”

The BLU Spy pulled a .22 from his pocket and shot the woman in the head. “Congratulations,” he said. “If you try to leave again, you’ll be a murderer and here illegally. The companies will personally hand you over to McCarthy as an enemy of democracy. Now drive that piece of shit bike back to the base.”

The RED Spy paled, looking at the blood creeping into the fabric around her, into the hole his body had made in the covers, and let himself be led to the motorcycle and ushered back to the bases.


	5. Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream

The Spy let the motorcycle fall in the garage and tottered to his bed. Distantly, he knew it was a matter of too many shocks in too short a period—trouble adjusting. He had not supposed the company to be fully serious about locating him once he escaped, nor did he expect that the company’s operatives would feel comfortable killing to make a point. The other spy had killed more casually than he would have thought, for an interrogator. He’d employed assassins who were not that casual in their ability to shoot. And over a simple taunt? That was precious little provocation to murder. _That poor woman_ , he thought. _If I had only known how seriously the company would take this, and how little they regard human life_.

What kind of company could operate so in a country like the US? Did they have government backing? The Heavy had mentioned that they were ignored by the US government, but what kind of government ignores the kind of group the company had assembled? None of these men were petty criminals. The Demo alone had the kind of demeanor and necessary habits of someone with decades of practice cracking safes and vaults. He, himself, was not a small person in his particular field. He’d run ten missions of varying scope inside Vietnam and other French colonies, changing their political landscapes. The Sniper—over twenty kills put him well inside the most elite assassins of the world. If he could only see the tattoos, he would know what groups the man had worked for, and be able to try and locate him via rumor.

The Spy stripped and fell face-first into the bed. There were too many unknowns. As far as tracking him, he supposed it was possible that they put a transmitter in all the vehicles. Since the base was in the middle of the desert, they’d have to take a vehicle with them if they planned on leaving it, and rigging something to transmit a signal was not impossible—bulky, but not impossible. He hadn’t seen anything on the motorcycle, but then he hadn’t looked very closely at the thing. He’d remedy that, next time. He also wouldn’t stop until he ran out of gas, and he’d have to hope it was on the side of a major highway, so he could hitch-hike. And he needed a stash of normal clothes. The scarlet suit was, quite simply, conspicuous as hell. He envied his counterpart. A navy blue suit was considerably less flamboyant. The Spy rolled over, considering his options. None of the other men, with the exception of the Sniper, appeared to share a pants size with him, and he wasn’t entirely sure the Sniper wouldn’t just shoot him if he found him stealing clothing.

He laced his fingers over his chest. Supposing he were to try again, he’d have to figure out what located him, find civilian clothes, practice an American accent, know enough about local politics to fit in seamlessly, find a major city, cultivate the kind of connections necessary to be smuggled out of the country and into France, and somehow make it home.

The Spy snorted with sardonic laughter. Only a few little things, a simple little list of easy to achieve goals, and he’d be home again. And then, of course, he’d have to figure out if his government intentionally burned him or if they even knew where he was. Easy enough. He fell asleep contemplating the long list of things he’d have to do in order to get those few simple tasks done, and wondered briefly if anyone had notified his mother that he was missing.

**< <<<<<< \- >>>>>>>**

The speakers crackled at six am the next morning, rousing him after a few hours of fitful sleep. That same dry, asthmatic voice called out the time, and advised them all to get up and get as much practice as they could in before the games started at six am the next morning. The Spy swore, finger-combing his hair, and threw the same suit on, grimacing at the smell of sex and sweat on it. He swore again when he realized that he had forgotten to steal cigarettes from the woman, and that he faced another day without any relief. His conscience twinged, and he apologized to the air in fluent, liquid French for the disrespect to the dead he had committed, and to the woman’s ghost, should it happen to exist, for the entire situation. Dressed but for tying the tie, he stumbled out of his room and toward the kitchen, catching up to a small parade of mercenaries headed toward breakfast and caffeine, or their morning rituals.

The figure in the suit had its mask off that morning, apparently deciding that it was too early to bother, and the Spy was unpleasantly shocked to find his colleague was, in all appearance, Vietnamese or something very like it. He was also heavily burned, and bore the stares of the other mercenaries with poor grace, gesturing irritably when offered food and glaring around him. Eyeing the rest of the mercenaries—for surely, if there were ever a group of mercenaries, this was it—the Spy saw a fairly competent group. Certainly, the air was tense with the promise of physical violence, from the huge paws of the Heavy to the extraordinary tension that hovered in the air around the Sniper. They eyed each other, taking each other’s measure like the professionals they were, and found that as a whole, they were a dangerous group.

The Engineer cleared his throat and looked at them all over his coffee mug. “I expect to see you all down in my lab before the end of the day to be scanned. If I have to, I’ll send someone after you, but you probably don’t wanna die permanently here, so if I were you, I’d get down there as soon as I do to get it over with. It ain’t a pleasant process, but it’s better than dying.”

Without waiting to see if anyone followed him, he turned and ambled out of the kitchen, mug still in hand. The Scout started after him, eyebrows knit together and mouth open, questions bubbling up out of him.

The Spy realized he was staring at the Sniper again, and that the man was staring back, confusion and frustration making his face seem drawn together in the center. When he turned his head, the Medic turned away quickly, clearly from watching them both. The sardonic little smile on the Medic’s face made the Spy nervous—the man was clearly observant, and drawing several conclusions from the look he exchanged with the Sniper. When he left the room, the Sniper followed him. They walked down the hall together for a minute, both headed for the Engineer’s lab. After a few minutes of quiet, the Spy broke the silence.

“I do not like how that man looks at me.”

A few steps later, the Sniper spoke. “He’s some kind of boss. Don’t know what kind, but some kind of boss.”

The Spy didn’t speak again until they reached the stairs. “This place disturbs me.”

The Sniper’s reply was almost too soft to hear. “Me, too.”

Pushing through the lab door, they caught the Engineer throwing the initial switch to scan the Scout. A dazzling burst of white light later, the boy slumped on the platform. The Engineer swore and manhandled him off.

“Come on, kid, it ain’t that bad.”

The Scout staggered and fell to the floor a few feet from the platform. He sat there, looking down, for a few minutes. The Spy and Sniper watched him, uneasy. When the Scout finally looked up, he was pale as paper.

“That was fucking terrible,” he moaned. “It kicks worse than homemade hooch.”

The Engineer growled at him. “It isn’t that bad. Jesus, kid, you’d think being made immortal would be enough to compensate for a little dizziness. When you can get up, the Medic will need a blood sample upstairs in his lab.”

He turned, looking at the Spy and Sniper. “Well, boys, who’s next?”

The Sniper shrugged irritably, and put down his rifle. “I’ll go.”

The Spy watched him climb the platform and stand, shifting slightly on his feet with unexpressed nervousness. The Engineer walked back over to the switch and threw it, bathing them all in hard, white light. The Scout gagged, turning his face, and when the light faded, the Sniper was swaying on his feet, blood drained from his face. He made eye contact with the Spy and shivered.

“That was fucking horrific, mate.” He made his way off the platform slowly and collapsed on a bench. The Engineer snorted.

“Ya’ll should have been here for the first few trials if you think this is bad. There’s a reason the Soldier is as delicate as he is. Well, come on then, Frenchie.” The Engineer pointed to the platform and the Spy climbed on it slowly, reluctance shouting in every line of his body. He clenched his fists and waited, watching the Engineer walk back to the switch and throw it.

Every cell in his body disintegrated at once, the creepy sensation of coming instantly apart making him want to vomit on his shoes. The light went into him, through him, through every single cell in his body, burning like fire in a sensation that was too pure to even be agony. When the light faded, he wanted to bathe himself in gasoline and strike a match so that he would never, ever have to re-experience that process. His mouth tasted like pennies, every hair on his body was standing on end, and he wanted very badly to strangle the Engineer with his bare hands. He staggered off the platform and sank down onto the bench beside the Sniper, panting. The Engineer let them sit for a little while before shooing them out of his lab and telling them to seek out the Medic. All three men walked slowly upstairs, speechless from the experience, and submitted to a blood sample. The Scout went back to his room immediately, and the Spy looked over at the Sniper.

“Do you, _m’seiu_ , have _anything_ to chase that experience away stashed in your camper? At this point, I would drink rubbing alcohol. They did not permit me time to stock myself when they bought me here.”

After an awkward moment, the Sniper spoke. “Tell you what. I’ll meet you in your room.”

“ _Oui_. Anything. Please, _bonne dieu_ , anything.”

The ghost of a smile hovered over the Sniper’s lips, and he looked as if he wanted to say something. The Spy blinked, then blushed. The Sniper’s ghost became a full-fledged smile.

“All right,” he said with the rolling vowels of his home. “See you there in a bit.”

The Spy watched him stride down the hall, long legs carrying him toward the outer door. _What the hell_ , the Spy thought, _is wrong with me?_

**< <<<<<< \- >>>>>>>**

When the Sniper walked in, he found the Spy sprawled across his bed, swearing monotonously in French. The Sniper didn’t speak much of the language, but recognized a few of the words from time spent doing contract work. The word “fuck” figured prominently in the rant. He closed the door softly behind him, looking at the man on the bed. Close to his own height, a hair over six feet, the man was long-legged and slender to the point of emaciation, a fact he knew better than to mention. The long blade of his nose suited him, as did the salt in his dark hair. The blue-grey eyes were striking, a color that reminded the Sniper of nothing so much as an outcrop of slate. The sensually pouting lower lip gave his entire face the appearance of overripe or even spoiled sexuality. The Sniper was very sure the man had made good use of the sex appeal nature had seen fit to give him over the years. Considering his profession, it would have been a shame if he hadn’t.

The Sniper found himself wandering, as the Spy sat up and gestured to the bed near him, if the man typically seduced women or men, or if he had any preferences at all. He certainly reacted as if he were having sexual thoughts—the blushing and speechlessness, in a man so obviously accustomed to being glib, was rather adorable. But it was possible he was misreading the man, and mercenaries could be very touchy on the topic. Better safe, he decided, than sorry. If nothing else, it would be pleasant to have someone to drink with on occasion.

He put the glasses down on the nightstand and filled them both before handing one over. The Spy leaned back on an arm and took his first sip, making a surprised, appreciative noise.

The Sniper cleared his throat. “What, are you surprised I can pick nice booze?”

The Spy blushed again and took a heavy belt from his glass.

“Surprise. You don’t have to be French to like the good stuff.” The Sniper found himself grateful that he’d picked up several congratulatory bottles while driving through California. He’d insisted on being allowed to take the long way, driving his camper, when he’d taken the job. The coast of California had reminded him forcibly of New Zealand, so he’d surrendered to the urge to stop at several of the wineries and farms he’d passed, picking up a crate of assorted wine, bottles of various preserves, and no small amount of game for the refrigerator in his camper.

The Spy licked his lips. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

The Sniper shrugged.

“Thank you for sharing,” the Spy said. “And for not shooting me.”

They looked at each other. The Spy spoke first. “This entire experience is ridiculous. This base, that… whatever that was. Killing each other. All ridiculous.”

The Sniper looked the Spy up and down. The man was babbling, blushing, and surprisingly unsophisticated for a man who seduced people for a living, all of which made it clear that there was some basis for attraction present. “Which way do you swing?”

“You’re blunt,” the Spy said, eyes glittering as he tilted his head.

“Who says I’m asking on my behalf?”

The Spy shrugged. “To answer your question, I swing whatever direction it pleases me to swing.”

They stared at each other for a minute. The Spy contemplated the man in front of him—the rangy strength of his body and his deep tan, the sense of wildness about him, as if he might, at any second, bolt out of the bed. The Sniper looked at the urbanity of the man in front of him, the slickness of behavior and habit that spoke, louder than words, of someone who spent a great deal of time negotiating with people.

“I like you,” the Sniper said quietly. “So far.”

“You’re really blunt,” the Spy said, and grinned.

“Not usually,” the Sniper said, leaning back on his hands. “You strike me as a bloke who’s got a little too used to being lied to. Thought I’d try the unexpected.”

“I’m not usually on bottom,” the Spy said.

“Me, either. I’m not usually attracted to your type.”

“And what type is that?”

The Sniper pulled a hand up and made a circling gesture. “Urbane. Clean cut.”

“What do you usually.…” The Spy let the words trail off.

“Pretty boys or them as knows what the outback is like. I like women as well, but other than Miss Pauling, I didn’t see any on base.”

The Spy took a breath, face sagging. “There is a town near here,” he said, voice tiny. “There are women there.”

The Sniper watched him, saying nothing. After a minute, the Spy spoke. “The Spy on the other team is a _batarde_.” He looked up at the Sniper. “I left the base and met a woman. He shot her.”

The Sniper sat quietly.

“I have killed before.” The Spy looked up through his eyelashes at the man sitting next to him. “I just… don’t kill for no reason.”

The Sniper sighed. “It gets easier, I hear. Never bothered me, exactly, but them as has moral issues with it tell me that it stops bothering you after awhile.”

“It’s not moral issues,” the Spy said indignantly. The Sniper turned a skeptical, old-fashioned expression at him and he swore. “ _Merde_. Perhaps slightly moral. It is not that I have not killed, it’s that when I kill, I do so for a reason. That was purposeless.”

The Sniper reached out and awkwardly patted his hand. “I do, too, but money is a purpose. Challenge is a purpose. And if it makes you feel better, mate, they say we can’t really die. So you won’t be killing anyone while you’re here.”

The Spy looked at the hand on his and followed the arm up to the Sniper’s face. “You really are an assassin, aren’t you?”

The Sniper kept his hand on the Spy’s hand. With a wry twist of his lips, he answered. “They say to pick something you love and are good at. The only think I was ever really good at was hunting, and I found out pretty early that hunting humans was the best challenge.” He paused. “It pays nicely.”

“ _Oui_ , I imagine it does.” The Spy turned his hand beneath the Sniper’s hand and lifted it up, turning the Sniper’s long, tanned fingers to look at the rangy strength of his arms. “One day,” he said slowly, “perhaps you will tell me how you got started. I have always wondered how one starts this as a profession.”

The Sniper froze before answering carefully. “Probably the same way you start as a Spy, mate.” He let the Spy examine his hand and wrist before speaking again. “Trade you stories. Not everything. I am a professional and I have standards. But I’ll trade you some information.”

“ _Oui_ , I understand. There are things about which I cannot speak.” The Spy paused, realizing that he was no longer an agent. Love of country, however, ran deep. Too deep patriotism and the love of secrecy, too deep to allow him to speak of what he was doing in Vietnam.

The Sniper nodded. “I don’t know about you,” he said quietly, “but I’m not liable to need practice shooting any time soon. Want to tie one on instead?”

“If you mean get drunk,” the Spy said with a sigh of relief, “I will most happily do so.”


	6. Us and Them

It took an embarrassingly small amount of wine for the Spy to get tipsy, something that he was able to hide right up until the Scout hammered on their door to ask if either of them knew how to shoot and could show him how to use the sawed-off shotgun he’d picked. At the sound of the Scout’s voice, cracking with stress, the Spy started giggling and leaned back, swaying, on the arm he’d put behind him. The Sniper looked over at him with a pleased and disbelieving grin.

“You must have been tense, mate.” He put his glass back on the nightstand and stood carefully, then shooed the Scout away with a promise to show him some other time. “Surprised you’re such a cheap drunk.”

“I spent a few weeks in a cage being tortured. It will make a light weight of anyone.” The Spy blinked, realizing what he’d just said, and looked over at the Sniper.

The Sniper’s eyebrows shot up, but he said nothing. He gently jogged the wine glass in the Spy’s hand, drawing his attention back to the booze. The Spy put the glass down very carefully.

“I think,” he slurred, “that I have had enough for a time.”

The Sniper chuckled. “Pity. You’re adorable when you drink.”

The Spy looked at him, flush burning two spots high on his cheeks. “You are,” he said quietly, “a most provoking man.”

“Is that so? What do I provoke?”

The Spy refused to answer, the flush deepening.

“Well, let me ask you something, city boy. What were you planning on doing with the rest of the afternoon?”

The Spy leaned over carefully, and the Sniper pulled his glass out from between them, curling his free hand around the Spy’s slender neck and meeting his lips. The wine was a tart sourness in the Spy’s mouth, astringent and floral, and even drunk his tongue was skillful—warm, caressing, teasing. The Sniper chuckled into the Spy’s mouth and pulled back.

“Let me lock the door and put the glass down, Sneak.”

The Spy opened his eyes, the lids fat as his lower lip. “Sneak? A strange name.”

The Sniper wondered if he knew that he was pouting, his lower lip fat and slick, and that the pout made him seem angelic. He was truly a beautiful man, something he no doubt had used like a weapon over the years. They appeared to be of an age, both in their early forties or perhaps late thirties, lives utterly different. He put the glass on the nightstand next to the Spy’s glass and locked the door.

Standing next to the bed, he spoke softly. “You realize we’ll have to be very quiet?”

The Spy laid back, the pout slowly shifting to a filthy smile. “ _Oui_ , but can you be quiet?”

The Sniper chuckled, a pleased sound. “Want to lay a little bet on it, Sneak?”

The Spy licked his lower lip and nodded.

“Neither of us usually bottoms, so how about we confine it to oral?” The Sniper watched as the Spy’s face lit up. _When was the last time_ , he thought, then decided it didn’t matter. “All right, you little lush,” the Sniper growled, “I’ll let you go first. Remember to be quiet.”

The Spy snapped the button off his slacks, kicking them and the briefs they’d provided him—with a mental twinge at the fact that they were briefs—to the bottom of the bed. The Sniper put a hand on the middle of his chest, stopping him, and deftly finished undressing him. The Spy lay, naked, on the blanket, and the Sniper looked him over. Cuts, scars, bullet holes, burns: the Spy was covered in the marks of his profession. The ligaments of his body lay just under the skin, itself a thin cover over ropy muscles. Despite his height, the man seemed nearly delicate, and the Sniper found himself wondering whether the Spy was naturally thin or just awful at taking care of himself. The Spy stretched, drawing the Sniper’s attention to the utterly depraved expression on his face, the knowledge of bodies and how to make them react. The Sniper looked at him for a moment, a smug smile fitting itself on his lips.

 _If he thinks he’s the only one that knows how to undo a man, he’s about to learn better_ , the Sniper thought. He reached out to run a calloused hand down the planes of the Spy’s torso, gently thumbing a nipple into hardness to watch the man shiver for him. The Spy arched up slightly into his thumb, then more as he pinched it gently, then with increasing pressure to see the Spy react. His lips framed a soundless moan, eyes glued to the Sniper’s avid gaze. _Pain_ , the Sniper thought, _appears to be all right. But how much? And where?_

The Sniper leaned forward, watching the Spy’s face, and captured the tight nub of a nipple in his mouth. At the faint hiss of the Spy’s breath, he rolled his eyes up and sucked a mouthful of skin into his mouth, slowly letting it slide from his lips until they circled the Spy’s nipple. He set his teeth gently into the nipple and watched the Spy’s face go slack, then tightened until he’d won a faint moan from the man. _Settles that question_ , the Sniper thought. _A fair amount of pain, and for all he says he doesn’t bottom, the man certainly knows to relax into the pain._

Balancing himself on his hands, he kissed a slow trail down the man while climbing over his leg and settling between them. When he reached the slab of muscle near his groin, he detoured, kissing the visible ridge of muscle that lead to the Spy’s cock, more than half hard. The Sniper sat back for a moment, contemplating the size of it against the thinness of the Spy’s torso. _Bet he’s popular_ , the Sniper finally thought. _Wonder if they pick them for this kind of thing?_

The Spy chuckled, a sound of pleasure, and whispered. “Well?”

The Sniper looked up at him, tempted to flick him for being impatient and for the joy of watching the man suffer. Instead, he reached out and wrapped his fingers around the Spy’s cock, anchoring it in place before slowly, teasingly, kissing around it. The Spy moaned and twitched, but otherwise lay still and let the Sniper draw the tension out, blood pooling in his cock.

The Sniper waited until the Spy stopped twitching and merely surrendered to the pace he was setting before easing his lips, soft as a whisper, over the Spy’s cock. The Spy made a strangled noise, fingers digging into the mattress, as the Sniper slowly, agonizingly slowly closed his lips, increasing the pressure by tiny increments as the man gasped. His tongue, hot and wet, slowly spooned around the bottom of the Spy’s cock, and the Sniper noticed with the satisfaction of a craftsman that the Spy’s fists in the blanket were white knuckled. With a slow increase of suction, the Spy’s cock slid little bit by little bit into the Sniper’s mouth, gliding back along his tongue and filling his mouth with heat and need. When the Spy’s cock rested against the back of the Sniper’s throat, he swallowed, the muscular movement sending a wave of pleasure up the Spy’s spine. For that he did moan, a hoarse, abandoned sound that made the Sniper shiver. The hand the Sniper had wrapped around the base of the Spy’s cock came up slightly and he swallowed again, setting up a rhythm between hand and suction that curled the Spy’s toes against his side.

The Sniper smiled around the Spy’s cock, a pleased tilt to his lips, and adjusted himself. He could tell from the Spy’s breathing and the pulse that was increasingly strong in the cock in his hands that the Spy was close, and he worked him as close as possible to an orgasm before stopping, watching the man look up at him with comical betrayal. The Sniper merely grinned at him, eyes rolled up to catch the Spy’s face. The Spy’s lips fell open, surprise and surrender on his face. The Sniper pulled back long enough to speak.

“Sneak, I am going to fuck you bowlegged sometime soon, and you’ll have just that expression on your face while I do it.”

The flush was back on the Spy’s face, along with a surprised pleading. _Oh, you are a slutty little thing_ , the Sniper thought, pleased. _Next time, I’m going to make you beg a bit, and we’ll just negotiate when you repay the favor_.

When he set his lips back around the Spy’s cock, the throbbing started nearly immediately, and with a mental shrug, the Sniper swallowed him back past the flap on the back of his throat. The Spy made a strangled moan, muffled by the fist in his mouth, and came so hard he curled up off the bed, nearly sitting up. The Sniper cleaned him off and sat back, watching the man shiver.

“I…,” the Spy’s mouth moved, but no sounds came out. “Where did you learn how to blow a man?”

“Funny story, mate,” the Sniper said, sinking back onto the bed to sit with his legs crossed. “I paid attention while I was blowing them.”

The Spy bit his lower lip and sat up, then reached for the Sniper’s shirt, unbuttoning it with shaking hands. The Sniper watched him. “Sneak, I know you don’t usually bottom, but you don’t appear to mind some of it.”

The Spy blushed again, charmingly. “You have a particular….” He took a breath and pushed the shirt from the Sniper’s shoulders, exposing a lean, tanned chest thick with dark brown hair. “You have a kind of air about you.”

The Sniper sat up and let the Spy push the shirt from his shoulders, then leaned back to give the Spy access to the button on his jeans. “So I’m told,” he said, amusement quirking the corners of his lips up. “I won’t say I never bottom, but I will say people tend to like it when I top.”

The Sniper felt the Spy’s shiver in the fingers easing his jeans down with considerable satisfaction. _Well_ , he thought, _if we’re going to be stuck here, I could do worse than to have a source of amusement_. _He is charmingly transparent_. _Wonder if he’d play a little game with me?_

Naked, leaning comfortably back on his hands, the Sniper watched the Spy lean down slowly, eyes on his, settling on his belly between the Sniper’s legs. _Clever boy_ , the Sniper thought. _That one has spent some time around hookers if he knows the trick where you get them to watch you work_. And as he expected, the Spy kept eye contact, letting him see his enjoyment at sucking cock as he worked, cheeks hollowing and inflating as his head moved, lips fattening, face reddened. With an avid stare, the Sniper bucked up slightly, choking the Spy to watch the tears form in his eyes and feel the Spy struggling to adjust. He let the Spy see his pleasure in it—the pleasure of causing a response, of causing a little pain, and as he suspected, the Spy displayed the tell-tale signs of arousal. It didn’t take him long, something he made a note to put off next time, to come into the Spy’s experienced and rather shamelessly filthy mouth. The Sniper let his eyes close, head tilting back, surrendering to it visibly as a reward to the Spy, who groaned.

The Sniper pulled him up by the hair to kiss him, to taste himself on the Spy’s tongue. When he drew back, the Spy chuckled.

“I like you, _m’sieu_. You are delightfully depraved.”

The Sniper curled his lip. “If you think this is depraved, Sneak, I am going to blow your mind.”

The Spy sat back, a challenging look on his face. “I should like to see you try.”

The Sniper merely stared at him, letting himself fantasize about chasing the Spy down, ripping his pants from him while he cried and tried to wrestle himself free, and plunging himself into the shaking, sweaty, crying Spy, the roughness and lack of lubrication making them both burn. The Spy saw it on his face and bit his lower lip again, a habit that the Sniper wondered if he knew he had. The expression on the Spy’s face was shyly impressed, and the Sniper wanted to take a picture of it and perhaps a bow.

“We should get dressed, Sneak, unless you want everyone to know what we were up to.”

The Spy tore his eyes from the expression on the Sniper’s face with effort and blinked heavily. “ _Oui_ , we should.” He frowned. “I do not like that Medic, and he is too observant by half.”

“Pretty sure he reports to someone, and I don’t want the bosses here to know about all my peccadilloes.” The Sniper pulled his pants on regretfully, buttoning them over his small belly with a frown. “If you want to make a regular thing of this, we’re going to have to hide it.”

“They have given me that invisibility device,” the Spy said, pulling his shirt on. “It would not be very troublesome to get out to your camper.”

The Sniper tensed, freezing.

“ _M’sieu_ , I am many things, among them discrete. I am not always somewhere where I may be myself, and if asked, I will not pry.” The Spy stepped into his slacks, then grimaced at the missing button and held them together, walking to the chest of drawers to pull another pair from them.

The Sniper sighed. “Tell you what, Sneak, let me do a little cleaning and don’t surprise me out there.”

“ _Mais oui_.” The Spy buttoned the new slacks and tucked his shirt into them. “You will want to tell me, then, when you wish company. I do not always wish to be leaving this to you, nor will I always be in the mood for company when you are, so do not expect me to come every time you call.”

The Sniper’s eyes narrowed. _Sonny-boy_ , he thought, _we’ll see about that a bit down the road_. “Sure,” he said.


	7. House of the Rising Sun

The Sniper left the room shortly thereafter, glancing up and down the hall before emerging from the Spy’s room. When he closed the door behind him, the Spy sighed, leaning momentarily against his chest of drawers and putting his head on his hands. The man was infuriating but dead sexy, from the self-assurance he displayed in bed to his apparent good taste in wine. The Spy decided to forgive himself the momentary lapse in reserve simply based on certain unfulfilled needs and the shock of the previous days. Leaving the suit coat off, he tucked a balisong—a weapon he’d learned to use in his time in Vietnam, from a Pilipino man he’d befriended—and a garrote in the pockets of his slacks. He left the shoulder holster on, the revolver in it. The Spy paused for a second, hand on the door knob, looking down at the visible gun butt under his arm.

 _How odd_ , he thought, _to be able to wear weapons openly instead of leaving them hidden_. There was no point, while he was among mercenaries, in being anything but what he was: a well-trained, well-armed man who had spent years training others, seducing information and compliance out of strangers, and occasionally killing, but more often sending others out to kill for him. Years of hiding himself, of fading into civilian populations as much as possible, and now he could be open about what he was. A prickle of unease reminded him not to let himself get sloppy, that there would likely be many things he’d have to hide, but he resolved to enjoy the perverse pleasure of getting to be what he was openly while it lasted.

In the hall, he ran into the Scout backing out of his room, sawed-off shotgun grasped in a sweaty hand.

“Oh hey,” the Scout said. “Hey, mister! You got time to show me how to use a gun?”

The Spy sighed, running a long-fingered hand through his hair. _It wouldn’t be the first time_ , he thought. “ _Bien_ ,” he said, resignation tinting his voice with a growl, and turned away. “But we must go to the armory for ammunition.”

The Scout sagged with relief. “Thanks, mister. I ain’t saying I never shot one before, but I am saying I ain’t shot anything this big before, and I ain’t ever been on”—he turned his free hand in a circle—“you know, like a battle field.” He ran to catch up with the Spy.

“Have you not been in fights?”

“Well, yeah, I mean, who hasn’t? But this isn’t like a fight.”

“Of course not. But when you fight with the group, all is chaos, _non_? And you find someone, or they find you, or you look around to find someone, and maybe you are tactical and pick someone you believe you can knock down, or with whom you have a grudge. And you knock them down, taking advantage of the chaos, or what they cannot see, or perhaps you help a friend.”

The Scout nodded at him. “Yeah, yeah. But we usually don’t jump bad with guns, ya know?”

“It changes things, _oui_ , but that is a little like the battlefield.” _Except_ , the Spy added silently, _that if this were real war, there would be a command structure and actual goals_. _Are we simply to kill each other for the amusement of the company?_ He shivered. Without a goal, without the love of country, without any goal, or any reason, to simply kill, stripped of anything but the goal of murder—this place was an obscenity.

 _What kind of man will I become if I do this for long_ , he thought. He looked over at the boy standing next to him, at the still sweet smoothness of his skin, eyelashes low over his eyes as he contemplated the gun in his hands. _And the boy, what kind of man will he become?_

 _At least_ , the Spy thought, every one of his years bearing down on him and inspiring a sullen, surprised rage, _my operatives were usually old enough to fucking shave_.

The Scout shifted next to him, uncomfortable with the silence and the expression that flowed across the Spy’s face, the shift from seriousness to what might have been pain, and then into a strange tension.

 _What can I do for the boy_ , the Spy thought, _but teach him how to survive?_

With an act of will, the Spy shut his feelings down, pushing away his unease and worry. It was not the time for those thoughts, or for any other feelings on the issue. The Spy grabbed an extra clip and a box of bullets, then gestured at the shotgun shells until the Scout took them. On their way out, he grabbed and filled a bottle of water. After a moment, the Scout mimicked him.

“It’s fucking dry as shit out there,” the Scout said. “When they told me I’d be bussed down the New Mexico, I didn’t even know this was a state. I mean, everyone’s seen the Bugs Bunny cartoons, but the name didn’t even sound American, ya know? Albuquerque? Like the whole ‘left turn at Albuquerque’ thing? And then they kept going south into the desert until they turned off the highway and got to this place. I ain’t never seen anyplace so middle-a-nowhere.”

“Boy, if you must keep talking, you will want to bring more water than that.” _The boy apparently never shuts up_ , the Spy thought, eyeballing the leggy blonde boy now trotting down the hall beside him and grateful for the petty annoyances the Scout offered him.

“Tell me something, boy, how old are you?” _Give me something, boy,_ the Spy added silently. _Something to keep myself from thinking about how fucking young you are._

The Scout snorted. “Old enough, Pops. Old enough to know what a cell looks like on the inside.”

The Spy pushed the iron outside door open. “You must have started young.”

“Got taken home in cuffs the first time when I was ten, Pops. Old enough. I seen a bit in my time.” _Come on, Pops_ , the Scout added silently, _I grew up in Boston. I ain’t no sit-at-home, panty waist_.

The Spy’s lips quirked, his gratefulness at finding out the boy had at least seen violence tempered by amusement. _It is_ , he thought, _alternately amusing and annoying, that tendency of the young to believe they had seen it all_. The sand crunched beneath their feet as they approached the range, punctuating his next sentence. “Boy, we can fire the gun, but since you’ll be running, you’ll want to practice strafing at some point.”

He looked over at the blue lanes, noticing a fresh spray of shells on the ground. “We are not likely to remain alone here for long. They share this space with us.”

The Scout looked over and kicked a shell with a faint skittering. “Somebody’s been busy. What’s strafing?”

The Spy blinked, mouth open slightly in shock. “I…. Boy, you have much to learn. A strafe is to move while shooting. You should not remain still unless you have most excellent cover. And you should practice shooting while moving as well as stationary shooting. You said you run fast? You will want to practice hitting things while moving as if your life depended on it.”

The Scout looked at him, eyebrows meeting in the middle. “How am I supposed to do that?”

The Spy looked around. “I would suggest perhaps putting a can on a fence post and running circles around it, but far away from me. For now, let us see if you can shoot that thing at all.” He gestured toward the cans. “The range of such a gun will be short, so you could not shoot it at anything past the cans in distance.”

With a brief and hidden spike of mischief, he added, “Go ahead, shoot it.” The boy was holding the thing one-handed, a recipe for rather serious muscle strain, and the Spy would be willing to bet that the first time he tried to fire the thing, he’d fall flat on his ass.

Sure enough, the boy pulled the trigger and fell flat on his ass, pinching his finger and taking a strip of skin from his palm. The Spy, guilt needling him for suggesting it, helped him up and corrected his stance—putting his hands over the Scout’s, he helped the boy figure out how to brace the gun to fire it, and how to keep his fingers out of the trigger. The butt of the thing, however, rapidly wore the skin off the inside of his palm. The boy said nothing but kept firing, gradually hitting the cans more and more often. The Spy felt a surge of pride and approval despite the annoyance the boy inspired in him, the familiar mantle of teacher settling on him. _Ah, but not too close_ , he cautioned himself quietly. _Not too close to him or any other here. There will come an opportunity to leave, and you must take it_.

“Boy, you will want to tape your hands to shoot for long.” The Spy looked down at the boy, looking at his scowl of concentration.

The Scout made a noncommittal grunt, still focused on racking shells into the gun’s altered chambers.

“Did you play sports, boy?”

“Yeah, Pops,” he said between the clicks of shells being loaded into the chambers. “Baseball.”

The Spy eyed the Scout’s legs, surprised he did not say track. “The same tape will suffice. Gloves would also suffice, but considering how often you must reload, you may find tape more useful.”

The Scout grunted again and chambered a shell, putting the now cool gun over his shoulder. “We should try the running.”

“No circles near me, boy.” The Spy took a step back.

“You know, Pops,” the Scout said, eyeing him up and down, “I got a name.”

“ _Oui_ , as do I. But as they told you, we do not use our names, here.”

“That’s so fucking weird,” the Scout looked back toward the base, scowling into the air. “It’s so fucking weird to be Scout. Like… to not be me anymore.”

The Spy sighed. A problem faced by anyone, the degree to which they were the role and themselves—the boy faced a long time of having to find a balance between the man he was and the role he played. _And even then_ , the Spy thought, _you will still be negotiating it_. After a long moment, he spoke. “Boy, there is a thing we must do. We must find who we are and keep some part of that away from the things we have to do. You must find your own balance. It is an individual thing.”

The Scout watched him for a moment, the lines beside his mouth deepening. There was something in his expression, perhaps the sheer blankness, which spoke too loudly of time spent as any man but himself. It was a terrifying thought, to stop being Scott and simply be Scout.

He wondered if the Spy still knew who he was at all.

The Spy took a breath, focusing again on the Scout. “Boy, you could probably just run back and forth in front of the lanes, since we are alone, and get some practice that way. But be careful where you aim that thing. I have no desire to test the Engineer’s invention before I must.”

With that, he turned back to the cans, un-holstering his revolver, and slowly started to pick them off. When the bang of the shotgun went off near him, he turned his head. The boy was running away from him, torso turned toward the lanes. The Spy was, quite frankly, amazed at how quickly the boy moved, spry as a rabbit. _Lapin_ , he thought. _The boy jumps and runs incredibly quickly. No wonder the company wanted him_. _I do not envy the other team, who must try to hit the boy_.

When the Scout ran out, the Spy gestured him in. “Boy, we usually come with little names when we must work with others. I am about to give you your first: _lapin_.”

The Scout stood for a moment, panting, before speaking. “What does it mean?”

“It is French for rabbit, boy.”

“Rabbit? Couldn’tcha think of something… you know… dangerous?”

“ _Lapin_ , there is a story they told where I… where I was. Rabbits are lucky, and they are also the spirit of youth. The gods hunt them.”

The Scout straightened. “All right, Pops, but did they catch them and eat them? That’s what I want to know. Besides, rabbits are kind of candyass.”

“Not, _Lapin_ , if you have ever tried to hunt the wild ones.” _Particularly_ , he added silently, _if you are very hungry when you do it_. Survival training had put him in the field with a knife and a prodigious appetite, and rabbits, while plentiful in the area in France which had hosted the training, were goddamn hard to catch by hand.

“All I’m saying, Pops, is that it’s kinda girlie.” The Scout let the gun dangle. “I’m outta shells.”

“You should go see the Medic about your hands.”

“What, this?” The Scout flipped his hands over, the wide band of raw skin on his palms oozing. “Aw, this ain’t even that bad.”

“It will be bad, _Lapin_ , when you try to shoot again tomorrow. Cringing, or even slowing down because of the damage could be fatal.”

The Scout grumbled, turning back toward the base. “Yeah, fine, whatever. I’ll go bug the Kraut.”

The Spy watched him until he grew small, then turned back to shooting.

**< <<<<<< \- >>>>>>>**

At dinner, the Sniper gave the Spy a significant, heated glance over the table, and despite himself, the Spy found he was eager to get a chance to strip the man again. He had been too tipsy and far too unsettled to pay much attention to the tattoos he’d been eager to see that morning, and he would be damned if he let the man think he was on top the entire time.

And after spending several hours with the boy, he felt a million years old and stained with the  innumerable sins of his profession. Time in the company of someone who would not remind him so viscerally of his age would be a pleasure.

The Spy showered, taking his time, and put the watch on. Combing his hair back one more time, he looked at his face in the mirror, turning it from side to side. He remained a fairly handsome man, and certainly one who understood what weapons it offered him, and it was about time that man learned the kind of weapons he possessed—less vanity than the knowledge that any and every weapon should be available.

The Spy emerged from his room, taking a cursory survey of the hall way, and flicked the button that made him invisible. One hand on the wall for balance, he walked carefully out of the base then paused just outside the door to let the cloak recharge. Making his way across the sand invisible was more challenging, but he found that staring at the camper allowed him to fix himself relative to something he could see. He let the cloak lapse and raised his hand to rap on the door.

The Sniper answered the door in nothing but a well-worn pair of jeans, and the Spy had to remind himself that he was a well practiced seducer of men and women in order not to do something really foolish, like let the man top him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slang notes: to jump bad is to fight.


End file.
